Yes, sticking strictly Traveller and using technology available at TL15 there's no need for orbits of any kind and equipment can be cheap and smart enough to remove humans from the loop altogether. You can build automated survey starships filled with those automated femtosats (which would end up being probes that land and operate on and near the surface of the worlds) which can self-deploy to a star system, survey every planet to ~ 1cm accuracy and get an accurate count of trees and good approximations of number of grass blades on each world. Animal and insect population counts would be conducted, DNA sampled and catalogued, and so on. Languages would be sampled and decoded, minerals mapped, governments and social structures identified.
Likewise, trading would be most efficiently done in such a way. Cargo found and paid for with automatically determined best possible credit terms, cargo loaded by robot, starship serviced by robot, and starship designs automatically refined over time as optimal solutions to particular loads and routes are determined.
At TL15, the way it is defined in Traveller, I can't imagine the need for a human being in space or on another world except, perhaps, for tourism reasons. Computers are almost self aware on the high end and in terms of specific tasks (such as designing an optimum free trader for any given set of routes) far better than humans are likely to be.
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I can picture the IISS having a "Spreader-sat" the size of a 2 liter
coke bottle that is in a fairly fast ball of twine orbit, and has
oodles of chipsats in launchers all over the outside of it. Drop one
in orbit, and it uses the launchers to pop one off every few minutes
to cover the planet. The chipsats would use mesh radio to relay from
one to another until the message got to the ship.
I can see the desire to add a player complication, or 'realism', but
after 3000 years of space operations, I'd think that what Early 21st
Century Terra calls "realism" and what 1100's Sylea calls "realism"
are two very different things.